On November 30, 2016, Dr. Ivan Sascha Sheehan – Associate Professor of Public and International Affairs – challenged claims made by former U.S. Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the Department of State, Ambassador Daniel Benjamin, and Washington Post columnist, Mr. Josh Rogin, against senior officials under consideration for posts in the Trump White House:

I am the author of three empirical, peer-reviewed journal articles that examine matters involving the exiled Iranian resistance group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), also known as People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI). I also penned the foreword to an independent 2013 study undertaken by Ambassador Lincoln P. Bloomfield Jr. that addressed the misinformation campaign directed at Western government policies toward the Iranian opposition group. Bloomfield, a former defense and foreign policy official who served three presidents over five administrations in the Pentagon, White House, and State Department, produced the scholarly history of the MEK to challenge conventional wisdom within the Department of State and to prompt fresh policy thinking…

After appearing at Townhall, the commentary was republished as the featured post at the Foreign Policy Association and has been shared thousands of times in less than a week.

Dr. Ivan Sascha Sheehan is the Director of the graduate programs in Negotiations & Conflict Management and Global Affairs & Human Securityin the College of Public Affairs at the University of Baltimore.

The annual conference – which featured crowds estimated at more than 100,000 – is the largest annual gathering of the democratic Iranian opposition in exile. The July event featured remarks by leaders from more than fifty countries, a bipartisan delegation of senior U.S. officials, and prominent academics from around the world. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran, democracy, human rights, the rule of law, and the deteriorating situation in neighboring Syria and Iraq were discussed.

Dignitaries in attendance included former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich; former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge; former U.S. Attorney General Judge Michael Mukasey; and former National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush, Frances Townsend, among many others.

Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud, a former Director of the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate, Saudi Arabia’s Intelligence Agency, pledged his commitment to regime change from within via the Iranian resistance. Clare M. Lopez, Vice President for Research and Analysis at the Center for Security Policy, reflected on the significance of the new alliance between the former Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., a member of the House of Saud, and the principal Iranian opposition:

Dr. Sheehan has written and spoken extensively on the concept of regime change from within in the context of Iran in both scholarly and news outlets and for the U.S. policy community. Sheehan is the Director of the graduate programs in Negotiations & Conflict Management and Global Affairs & Human Security in the College of Public Affairs at the University of Baltimore.

…policymakers viewed Rouhani’s election as a vindication of the 2009 protests on the Iranian street. The uprising was brutally repressed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp after Western powers turned a blind eye to the regime’s domestic violence and intimidation.

Not only was the rhetoric inconsistent with supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s repressive stances on free speech, academic freedom, minority rights, religious pluralism, gender equality, and democratic activities but Rouhani’s follow-through on promised reforms proved elusive. Though it may not matter to Western officials, the failure to enact reforms greatly impacted Iranian citizens who came to rue their initial support for the apparent moderate.

Dr. Sheehan is the Director of the graduate programs in Negotiations & Conflict Management and Global Affairs & Human Security in the College of Public Affairs at the University of Baltimore.

In the aftermath of terrorist attacks in Istanbul on June 28, Dr. Ivan Sascha Sheehan – Associate Professor of Public and International Affairs – questions the wisdom of Donald Trump’s embrace of torture as an appropriate counterterrorism tool. The criticism is situated in the context of studies Dr. Sheehan has undertaken over the past ten years on matters related to evidence-based counterterrorism policy. #PDF#PR

Excerpts:

When force disintegrates into barbarism in asymmetric conflicts, as it was shown to do in footage released in 2003 depicting abuse and humiliation of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison, the negative effects are magnified. The photographs of U.S. soldiers and CIA personnel abusing Iraqi prisoners was not simply, as Fareed Zakaria (2005) put it, just “bad public relations”:

Ask any soldier in Iraq when the general population really turned against the United States and he will say, ‘Abu Ghraib.’ A few months before the scandal broke, Coalition Provisional Authority polls showed Iraqi support for the occupation at 63 percent. A month after Abu Ghraib, the number was 9 percent.

The briefing, held in the U.S. House of Representatives Rayburn Office Building, came just one week after a terrorist attack on Iranian dissidents killed 24 individuals and wounded dozens more. The briefing featured assessments of U.S. Iran policy in the the context of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran and bipartisan condemnations of recent violence directed at the Iranian opposition detained in Iraq. The missile attack received widespread coverage in U.S. media including articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, The Associated Press, and FOXnews.com.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-AZ) issued a strong statement describing the attack as an “outrage” which “represents a betrayal of the civilians the United States committed to protect.”

“The world’s shift to a pro-engagement policy with Tehran facilitated the decision to crack down on those individuals promoting freedom, democracy, human rights, gender equality, the rule of law, and a non-nuclear Iran.

The attack is just the most recent example of the Iranian regime’s continued state sponsorship of terrorism, in spite of the nuclear agreement.

As the United Nations General Assembly gets underway, Dr. Ivan Sascha Sheehan, Associate Professor of Public and International Affairs, weighs in at Al Jazeera on the human rights situation in Iran and the unique opportunity before world leaders.

Excerpts:

“The Iranian regime continues to execute its citizens at a higher rate than any U.N. member state. In fact the regime boasts the highest rate of executions per capita in the world, surpassing even China. More than two thousand have been executed on President Hassan Rouhani’s watch in just two years, more than in any similar period in the past twenty-five years.

Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution makes the case that regime change in Teheran is the “best nonproliferation policy.” But regime change from within may also be the best strategy to uphold human rights.

U.S. President Barack Obama makes a mistake by treating Tehran as a fixture of the Middle East landscape but other U.S. officials need not make the same mistake. International law does not simply guarantee sovereignty. It upholds human rights. States are instruments of and by the people, not the other way around.”

Dr. Sheehan is the Director of the graduate programs in Negotiations & Conflict Management and Global Affairs & Human Security in the College of Public Affairs at the University of Baltimore.

Dr. Ivan Sascha Sheehan, Associate Professor of Public and International Affairs, and Dr. Raymond Tanter, Emeritus Professor of Political Science and former National Security Council Staff in the Reagan-Bush administration, take to the pages of Foreign Policy to issue a call for bipartisanship in the context of congressional oversight of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran.

Foreign Policy was founded in 1970 by prominent Harvard University professor of political science, Samuel Huntington, to give a voice to alternative views about American foreign policy at the time of the Vietnam War.

Since this time it has grown into one of the leading foreign policy magazines in the world with a readership of millions:

“Over the course of almost half a century of award-winning journalism, design, and the presentation of important new ideas from the world’s leading thinkers, Foreign Policy has established itself at the forefront of media organizations devoted to the coverage of global affairs. Through Foreign Policy Magazine, our website ForeignPolicy.com, and FP Events, the FP Group reaches an international audience of millions and has become a trusted source of insight and analysis for leaders from government, business, finance, and the academic world.”